Carla: I ALWAYS love reading your posts. i don't always fully understand everything you write as i'm still learning about a lot of stuff and maybe one day i WILL BE A MACHINIST. just curious though i don't think you named a #1 vise company or did you? also i think i recall you knew the owners of Columbian. yes? did you know any other vise company owners?
COPE: so true. have you had the pleasure of trying any of these other vises out even on a friend's or other company's bench? nothing wrong with an old Columbian and stories are told that their steel was better so they could make their jaw towers hollow. maybe Carla can tell us more about that?
Hello, DIF,
I'd gotten into saving vises, along with other oddments of small-tool widgetry, back in the 1960's, when dear father and some of his friends would deal in various items from surplus auctions, and I'd be asked to 'save out a good vise for me' by mechanic friends.....you've doubtless read about the 'hot-rod fiends' of the time. Later, I joint-ventured with some friends in more surplus dealings.....it seemed that at any plant, department, or base closure sale, there would always be a pallet of vises, some broken, some battered, and a few reclaimable ones, which would go ever so cheaply.
Actually, no, I didn't ever know anyone in the vise trade, aside from a metalworker friend who had moved to Seattle after having been a worker in the Reed works for a while, and had a few 'best fitup' selected Reed vises, which he'd (presumably) taken home as 'unofficial surplus' aka 'lunch-box specials'. He was proud of his work in the Reed product, and could tell you....in three-part harmony, with feeling... why the Reed make was superior in significant details to any of their competition.
I was able to purchase the Columbian material some years ago, when it was offered on the internet. This is a group of scrap-books kept by H. F. Seymour, who was the VP in charge of vise production at the Columbian Hardware Co, from the 1920's to the 1950's.
Along with the cuttings of Columbian and competition advertising, its a wonderful piece of American history, the 'human side' of industry, as seen by a management person who had to struggle...and prevail... with the many issues of keeping a production operation running, and with selling the product.
Reading the copies of his letters to client firms, and his published material in various trade magazines, from dealing with the 'National Recovery Act' bureaucracy during the 'hard times', to facing the challenges of keeping priorities for materials, and recruiting staff to keep the production up during the 'three shifts' days of the 1939-45 war, gives one quite an example of the lives of the men who......as the current phrase goes....'made America great'.
Re the Columbian castings......indeed, those castings are relatively 'thin section'. The Columbian works specialised in a great variety of malleable iron castings for many purposes, where a (relatively) unbreakable casting was desired. You can read about the casting and heat-treatment techniques needed to produce malleable, on the internet, with the explanation of the reason why thin sections are required for the necessary granular structures to form.
I was told that the Yost works made the 'Starrett-marked' vises on contract, using malleable, to be a quality product, and, if I understand correctly, the Wilton make of vises are....or were, at one time....run in malleable. You can see abused Wilton vises which were bent, but not broken...this would be consistent with the use of malleable.
As to the 'Rolls-Royce' of vises, those would have to be the British vices made from steel forgings.....expensive, to be sure, but as nearly abuse-proof as such things might be.
I suppose one might say that the Reed and Athol makes might be called the 'Packard' and 'Pierce-Arrow' of vises, and the Parker make might be the 'Ford', but, really, best grade vises were a standardised commodity product, and, except for some patented features, one maker's vises were pretty much as serviceable as any other. I'd think that some research might turn up a set of Navy specs for bench vises, which all those makers who hoped for government contracts would be careful to meet.
The impression I get is that sales volume, other than government contracts, depended mostly on establishing sales territories with various industrial supply houses. I can remember seeing the displays of Reed vises at one place, Parker at another, etc. What did matter was that the local supply house one patronised would keep a stock of repair parts, lest one have a careless worker who would break a vise (as happened to me, some years later, when I had to make a new main screw for the old Prentiss vise on my own bench at work.)
(and...careless workers were no joke.....years ago, a local scrap-yard had the broken halves of a 250-ish lb. wrought-iron anvil on display.....I'd not care to meet the man who could, literally 'break an anvil'.)
Oh.....and if you were wondering.....the vises I use, in my little 'skunk works' here, are a 4-1/2" Prentiss, 4" Reed, 4-1/2" Reed, and a 2" Prentiss light jewellers' type, all swivel base and swivel back jaw., a 4-1/2" Athol, stationary base/jaw at the welding area, and a #1 Oliver for my woodworking bench. I've a 4-1/2" swivel-jaw Columbian, in storage, waiting for bench space.....someday.
cheers
Carla
DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE??
